Hour Escape – Escape the Gallery

Theme:
“You and your team have been caught stealing a priceless work of art.
Security are holding you until the police arrive in 60 minutes.
Do you have what it takes to escape the gallery in time”

A nicely decorated and well lit room, with a LOT of goodies to look at an search through (more on that later) clean, and spacious the room will easily accommodate the full team numbers.
The decoration was simple yet done very well, with the areas of the game having distinct feels to them. Whilst nothing was a wow moment, the room felt like a lot of time and energy had been put into getting the atmosphere just right.
In the later stages of the game there was lots of “eye candy” to look at, after all you’re in an art gallery! Which was nice, and the space did capture the feel of an art gallery.

Game Play:
A fairly open game that was two-fold.
Goal 1 was to escape the gallery, and goal 2 was to collect as much money and jewels as possible whilst we were escaping (we are thieves after all, it says so in the story) – This lead to a game which was almost of 2 halves. The first half being incredibly search heavy, with a couple of nice logic puzzles thrown in.
The 2nd being almost entirely “physically” search free (whist you could still technically search for the whole game, the intensiveness and amount of work needed to complete the 2nd half of the game really constricts your search efforts, especially in a smaller team)
The second half of the game consisted of a task that was somewhat repetitive in nature, visual and observational. That being said, it is a task that can technically be done solely by 1 team member whilst there are a couple of puzzles to keep the others busy along the way.
The flow was nice and fast paced certainly in the early stages with masses of searching and the rewards of finding (and the enjoyment of making an unholy mess) but the pace and fervour tailed off in the latter parts of the game leaving us with some word and math puzzles to effect our escape.
A good room for bigger groups who can really give the place a good once over, the bigger the group the better for this room!

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via a screen

Game Host:
Dan was our game host, and he was clearly passionate about his rooms! He ran our game well, giving us plenty of nudges in the right direction